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As Colman, Bishop of Lindisfarne, looked out over the North Sea from the cliff top where Whitby Abbey stood, the familiar verses from the Apocalypse may well have leaped to mind: "And the dragon stood on the shore of the sea. And I saw a beast coming out of the sea."

By the middle of the 7th century, England had felt the wrath of more than one beast from across the sea, and to Colman, the traditions practiced by the Church of Rome must have seemed no less threatening to his cherished Celtic way of life.

Several waves of missionaries had evangelized England during the church's early centuries. According to tradition, Joseph of Arimathea himself had introduced the Gospel to British shores at present-day Glastonbury.

Christianity's early gains in the south were reversed, however, when pagan Jutes, Saxons, and Angles (from whom Angle-land eventually took its name) overran most of the island in the 5th and 6th centuries, pushing the native Britons into Wales and Cornwall.

But while the Britons fell before the pagan invaders, the pagan gods gave way to the gospel of Christ. In 597 AD, Pope Gregory the Great sent a missionary to England to promote the gospel among the heathen. His representative, Augustine, received a cordial if unenthusiastic welcome from the Saxon King Ethelbert, whose wife, fortuitously, was Christian. From the church Augustine founded at Canterbury, Roman Christianity began to spread across southern England.

At about the same time, another missionary movement gathered momentum in the north, flowing outward from the Scottish island of Iona, where the Irish monk Columba had established a religious foundation based on the Celtic Christian traditions that still held sway in Ireland. Both the Augustinian and the Columban branches of the British Church thrived and expanded until, inevitably, the two traditions bumped heads.

The bump occurred in the Saxon Kingdom of Northumbria. The Northumbrian King, Oswy, embraced the gospel, but his counselors were divided over which of the two conflicting traditions deserved his allegiance. He therefore called a council of the Northumbrian clergy to decide the momentous question of whether to embrace the Celtic or the Roman styles of worship.

Colman championed the Celtic traditions as the more endemic, "British" brand of Christianity, with roots dating back to pre-Saxon days. He, along with Hilda, Abbess of Whitby Abbey, where Oswy had chosen to convene his "Synod," looked upon the Roman ways as foreign to Britain, as another beast from across the sea threatening to overrun Britain once again.

Yet the differences between the Celtic and Roman practices, at least insofar as they were debated at Whitby, were trivial. Only two main issues divided the Northumbrian clergy. One concerned what kind of haircut monks should wear—the Romans' circular hairless spot shaved on the top of the head or the Celtic semi-circular hairless arc on the forehead. The other involved the method of setting the date for Easter. On these issues, the future of Christianity in Northumbria turned.

An Anglo-Saxon monk, the Venerable Bede, writing 60 years after the event, penned one of only two known accounts of the Synod of Whitby. According to Bede:

"King Oswy first observed, that it behooved those who served one God to observe the same rule of life; and as they all expected the same kingdom in heaven, so they ought not to differ in the celebration of the Divine mysteries; but rather to inquire which was the truest tradition, that the same might be followed by all; he then commanded his bishop, Colman, first to declare what the custom was which he observed, and whence it derived its origin. Then Colman said, 'The Easter which I keep, I received from my elders, who sent me bishop hither; all our forefathers, men beloved of God, are known to have kept it after the same manner.'"

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